Word: mbeki
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...terrible as these numbers are, they're bound to get worse. While some of the talk in Durban focused on modest advances in AIDS treatment--and on South African President Thabo Mbeki's flirtation with discredited ideas about what causes AIDS--the central dilemma of the conference was how to fight this voracious plague under the conditions that made the continent so vulnerable in the first place...
...president, who set alarm bells ringing in the scientific community and the White House this spring by publicly questioning the HIV-AIDS link, and inviting two discredited U.S. scientists who argue that HIV is not the cause of the disease to serve on a government advisory panel. But while Mbeki insists he is merely exercising his right to hear all opinions, critics - including most of the medical community in his own country - charge that this is dangerous dabbling that deflects from the primary objective of stopping the spread...
...Mbeki is certainly on solid ground in stressing that economic factors determine who will survive and who will die of AIDS. Drug treatments that have successfully slowed the onset of AIDS in HIV-positive people in the West would, even at discounted prices, cost at least $1,000 per patient every year, on a continent where average annual incomes are well below $400 and 25 million people are believed to be infected. Indeed, pharmaceutical corporations will take even more heat than Mbeki has from the activists and scientists involved in the conference, many of whom urge dispensing with profit motives...
...needed to simply contain the spread of HIV in the continent without even beginning to treat it, assistance from the West also becomes a matter of life and death - Africa currently spends some $15 billion each year simply on servicing its debts to the industrialized world. Of course, while Mbeki champions this point of view, domestic critics question whether it wouldn't be more persuasive if his government weren't spending some $5 billion on new jet fighters and submarines when it is AIDS, rather than some foreign military, that will kill half of South Africa's current generation...
...That declaration infuriated Mbeki's government, which saw it as a political attack and reportedly put pressure on South African participants to cancel a press conference scheduled for Monday to discuss its contents. And in Sunday's speech, Mbeki dashed expectations that he'd back away from his earlier pronouncements. Referring to the AIDS phenomenon, Mbeki said "it seemed to me that we could not blame everything on a single virus." That left conference-goers disappointed and alarmed, as it was left to maverick populist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to speak the simple truths about South Africa's AIDS crisis during...